Frankie Styx

Styx is the debut solo release from Frankie. There is beauty in the drone; love, loss, hope and desolation hidden in the overtones. There is intimacy and there is open space. The drone can explore tender closeness and it can experience painful, longing distance. Styx is bookended by hypnotic samples of racing cars tearing around a track, all meticulous planning and scientific, mechanical control, fighting for supremacy against reckless human abandon and the chase of pure adrenalin. These sounds fade into meditative, harmonic-drenched strings which in turn, on opener Sappho, give way to Frankie’s staggeringly beautiful, soft vocals. Across the next five tracks, including a cover of Frankie Sparo’s 2003 track ‘This Lie,’ Frankie pulls us through her soul laid bare. She wields the harmonies and melodies on her cello as part of the narrative, a resonant and patinated counterpart for her gentle, pure voice tones. Frankie performs with restraint and absolute finesse throughout, allowing her vocals to bear the brunt of the substantial emotional weight. Frankie seems to discover life, or the purest optimism, hiding in the harmonics that live between the loops and notes. After almost thirty minutes of deep, raw intimacy, Frankie finds all the tear-jerking hope, space and breath as if looking out at an iridescent pink and blue sunrise, washing away the rest of the mini-album’s desperate soul-seeking sleepless night. And here are those cars again, around the track they go, haunting us like phantom harmonics. Frankie is on tour with Senyawa across the UK in April About Frankie Frankie (Franziska Aigner) works at the intersection of music, philosophy and performance. She studied at P.A.R.T.S., the school of choreography and dance in Brussels directed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and has performed her own work at theatres and festivals across Europe. Frankie worked with the artist Anne Imhof on the performances Deal (2015), Rage (2015), and Angst (2017), as well as Faust (2017), which was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. She performed and co-wrote the music to Faust, which was released as a LP on PAN in 2019. In 2019 she joined Holly Herndon’s vocal ensemble, performing the album 'proto' around the world. Frankie continues to work and perform with Anne Imhof, and with artists such as the choreographer William Forsythe and the filmmaker Austin Jack Lynch. In 2020 she completed her PhD at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (crmep), London on the topic of Kant and Technics. She is currently an instructor in philosophy at the New Centre for Research and Practice.